Honou Productions – Anime Music Videos

2024 Anime Boston AMV Contest Opening

June 11, 2025 LantisEscudo

Beginning with 2024, Anime Boston no longer had a designated theme, so I needed to come up with an idea for an opening without that prompt to start brainstorming from. The idea finally sprouted when I was talking to a friend of mine that goes to Otakon every year, and they complained about the contest opening always using the entire song of ELO's "Twilight" because they felt it was too long.

I decided I wanted to create an opening that I could reuse large parts of the framework of year-to-year, using an iconic song related to Boston. Finding the song was a pretty easy choice, as "Shipping Up to Boston" is used almost everywhere, and it also is a rocking song that definitely gets crowds excited. I found a really good instrumental version that I could cleanly shorten down to about a minute to avoid overstaying its welcome.

My primary idea was to take scenes from anime and juxtapose them against shots of landmarks from around the city. I spent a couple days running around the city shooting my own footage, since it was a lot easier to get the shots I wanted that way instead of trying to use stock footage libraries.

There are a couple of local and con in-jokes in the video, such as the pairing of the Isabella Gardner Museum (the site of a famous unsolved art heist) and Lupin. The first two shots are nods to the con's history, as Charlie's Kitchen was the restaurant the con's founders were in when they decided to start the con, and the Park Plaza was the con's home for the first two years before it moved to the Hynes.

It got a good reaction at the showing, and I also started including it as the opener to the awards show, as it only adds a minute to the run time, but sets up the showing better than jumping straight into the awards.

Video - Various Anime, Original footage
Audio - Dropkick Murphys - Shipping Up to Boston (instrumental)
Completed March 2024

YouTube Link

AMV Videos

The Hero We Need

June 11, 2025 LantisEscudo

One of my other hobbies besides AMVs is collecting retro video games, which is how I first discovered the existence of Eight Man, which has an also-obscure game for the Neo Geo. The series was originally broadcast in 1963/64, and is the origin of Japan's first cyborg superhero, predating Kamen Rider by about eight years. A few years ago, I saw a post on then-Twitter announcing that the series was getting a BluRay release in Japan, and on a whim, I decided to jump on it, and it sat in my collection waiting for an idea to strike.

Inspiration finally struck right after the deadline for RICE 2024, and just before the deadline for Sakuracon, when I stumbled across a copy of the Fleischer Superman shorts in a store and the Superman/Eight Man parallel jumped into my head. I listened to quite a few different Superman themes to figure out which one fit best, and settled on the Lois & Clark version, partially because I could use the original opening as a reference to make a shot-for-shot parody, since I wanted to send something new to Sakuracon and only had a few days to put it together.

I managed to find the matching fonts from the original L&C opening for the credits, and also put the accurate matching credits for Eight Man (though with character names instead of actor names). There were a few shots I had to stretch a bit to find a match to the original shots (especially for some of the Lois shots), but mostly managed to find something that was close enough to work.

This was fun to make, and I want to use the series again someday.

Video - Eight Man
Audio - Jay Gruska - Lois & Clark Main Theme
Completed February 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

AMV Videos

Parallel Valleys

June 11, 2025 LantisEscudo

This video probably holds my personal record for the longest time between initial idea and actually editing the video. I've found notes about this idea in text files dating back to at least 2005, so it's 19 years old minimum. I had actually completely forgotten about it for quite a while, until I was going through some old hard drives and found one of my old lists of potential ideas.

The song had a lot of strong potential for using either Utena or Anthy as the viewpoint character, so I'd originally intended to do this as two separate videos, with working titles of "Ravine: Utena Face" and "Ravine: Anthy Face." After finding the old list and pulling the idea out of mothballs, I decided to do a single video, side-by-side with synched edits that would be in parallel for some sections.

I edited the Utena side first, then duplicated the timeline and replaced each edit clip-by-clip for the Anthy side, so that all of the edits and transitions would retain the same timing. I had to do some adjustments for where I'd used a native cut or fade, but overall, it was a thankfully straightforward process.

There are places I wish I'd matched the direction of camera movement between the two sides a bit better, but overall, I enjoyed how this one turned out.

Video - Revolutionary Girl Utena
Audio - Ace of Base - Ravine
Completed February 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
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AMV Videos

Burning Rubber

June 11, 2025 LantisEscudo

An editor friend of mine made an observation to me after AWA 2023 that I never edited with current sources, so it was sometimes easy to pick me out in blind contests. It was accurate - I'm usually very behind on watching things, given my already-huge backlog, but I wanted to deliberately defy their expectations for the next big blind contest, RICE in 2024.

Unusually, I actually watched Overtake! as it was coming out, so it was only a few months old when I started editing the video. I've been an F1 fan for a few years, so the iconic opening theme that includes the car engines as part of the music seemed like a perfect pairing. I went with the opening size version of the song rather than the full length version, since I didn't think I could sustain the energy needed for three and a half minutes with the available footage, but I think that also ended up biting me later when I ran out of song for the finale and had to rush the conclusion. I wish I'd been able to find a happy medium between them, but my audio editing skills couldn't find good cut points to shorten the longer version.

The length also ended up biting me in a couple of cases, as it was too short for many contests' main categories, but also wasn't an opening parody or a commercial.

Overall, this wasn't a bad effort, and I'm glad to have edited a video to yet another series that felt heavily overlooked.

Video - Overtake!
Audio - Brian Tyler - F1 Main Theme
Completed January 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
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AMV Project Editor Videos

Hinako’s Lullaby [Shabu Showdown 2023 Week 4]

June 28, 2024 LantisEscudo

The theme for the final round of Shabu Showdown was "Seven Deadly Sins," and I needed "Broadway Musical" on my bingo card to complete the double bingo, so I started looking for songs that could fit. Sleeping With Hinako had come up in conversation a few days before and I thought it would be amusing to use again, so I settled on Sloth as my sin pretty early. I was looking for lullabies or songs about sleeping and found Sylvia's Lullaby from Finding Neverland that felt like it'd work pretty well.

I did also have footage from Training With Hinako or Bathing With Hinako available, but neither of them ended up having any scenes that fit.

All in all, it was a fun little edit, but it did feel pretty similar to my video Naptime from back in 2010.

Video - Sleeping With Hinako
Audio - Laura Michelle Kelly - Sylvia's Lullaby (from Finding Neverland)
Completed December 2023

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
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Award Winner LAMV Project Editor Videos

Beyond the Shire [Shabu Showdown 2023 Week 3]

January 11, 2024 LantisEscudo

The theme for the third round of Shabu Showdown 2023 was "Spectacular Settings," where editors were given one week to edit a video focusing on the scenery or setting of a source, rather than the plot or characters.

I immediately decided to use the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies, because of all the huge sweeping establishing shots in the films. The song was a lot harder to come up with, and I reached out for suggestions, and ended up getting the excellent song I ended up using from a link provided by VioletSkies.

I was also dealing with several real life things outside the event at the time, and I was worried I wouldn't be able to finish the whole song, so I edited a short version of the video that ended with the end of the first movie, just to have something to submit in case I ran out of time. I also decided once I started the second segment to focus just on Sam and Frodo's path through the films for narrative simplicity, though that did mean giving up the initial inspiration shot for the video (the epic long helicopter shot of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli running across the landscape in pursuit of the Orc army).

In the end, it came together much better than I initially thought it would, and was given the "Epic Fantasy" coordinator's award at the end of the event.

Video - Lord of the Rings movie trilogy
Audio - Tommee Profitt x MILCK - BEYOND
Completed November 2023

YouTube Link

FMV Project Editor Videos

The Lives and Times of Dirk the Daring (Shabu Showdown 2023 Week 2)

January 2, 2024 LantisEscudo

The theme for the second round of Shabu Showdown 2023 was 20th Century Time Capsule - editors had a week to create a video with a video or audio source (and preferably both) originating between 1901 and 2000.

My original idea was really dark, with Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" to the 2000 movie Battle Royale, which I decided was a bit too much for this sort of event. I did like the idea of using the song, though, and so I started looking through my collection of discs when I remembered Dragon's Lair, which fit the song really well, and still was lighthearted enough that it felt more appropriate.

All of the footage segments were very short (usually under 60 seconds, with the deaths even shorter), so I divided them into three buckets: "successes" which I used for most of the first section of the video, "deaths" which filled most of the remainder of the video, and "skeleton bounce," which was all of the variants of the game over animation. If I remember correctly, there are 27 different versions with the same animation over different backgrounds. I ended up only using it for the final segment of the video, and synched up several of them to cut between on the beat for that final shot.

People definitely enjoyed it, and a few suggested I send it to events that accept video game and western animation videos, which I may do.

Video - Dragon's Lair
Audio - Queen - Another One Bites the Dust
Completed November 2023

YouTube Link

AMV Project Editor Videos

Visions of Disaster (Shabu Showdown 2023 Week 1)

January 2, 2024 LantisEscudo

The theme for the first round of Shabu Showdown 2023 was Owl House Covens - editors had a week to create a video illustrating one of the covens from the show Owl House. The only one that sparked an idea quickly for me was the Oracle coven, which dealt with fortune-telling, clairvoyance, divination, etc.

I had recently been thinking about Sailor Moon, and remembered Rei (Sailor Mars) and her divinations using the sacred fire in her home temple, but it took me longer than I expected to find the footage I needed. I had forgotten how much was in the Doom Tree arc and had been looking in the S season instead. I interspersed the Sailor Moon footage with footage from a bunch of other series and movies that showed the aftermath of major natural disasters to indicate what she was seeing visions of.

For audio, I went back to my familiar well of production music and Two Steps From Hell, which worked for the video, but I decided after this round that I wouldn't use TSFH for the rest of the event, wanting to break out of that familiar rut.

Reactions to it were pretty positive, and I'm pretty happy with the result.

Video - Sailor Moon (original and R), Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, Your Name, Weathering With You, Princess Mononoke, Millennium Actress, The Wind Rises, Ponyo
Audio - Two Steps From Hell - Mercy in Darkness
Completed November 2023

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
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AMV Videos

Hypotrochoids and Epitrochoids

December 7, 2023 LantisEscudo

I was worried that I wouldn't finish Trí Scéal in time for the AWA Accolades deadline, so I had this idea hanging around in my head as a backup idea that I could put together very quickly just in case. When I actually finished with about a day to go to the deadline, I decided to try and get it done as a second entry.

I first heard Jay Foreman perform one verse of the song in a YouTube video (an episode of The Park Bench with Matt Gray where Jay subbed in for Tom Scott), and was what I intended to use before I had bought copies of Jay's album, which included a version with four verses. I thought that was probably a bit much, and cut it down to just the first and last verses for the video.

For video, I just ripped every 16:9 BluRay in my collection I could think of that might include someone writing, and scrubbed through looking for workable scenes. I decided early on that I'd only use one shot from each source, so I had to come up with quite a few. I actually spent far longer just waiting for discs to rip than I did actually assembling the video.

It wasn't until I was putting clips on the timeline that I noticed some of the writing was very frantic, and decided on the fly to have the franticness build as the video went on, which made the final video far better than my original plan of just throwing everything on the timeline and hoping it flowed.

The title is a cheap math joke, because it's the mathematical names for the two shapes that a Spirograph draws - hypotrochoids if the moving wheel is rolling around the inside the stationary wheel, epitrochoids if the moving wheel is rolling around the outside of the stationary one.

It got a good reaction from the other competitors, and was nominated as a finalist in the Trailer/Parody category (because several people thought it was from an actual commercial for Spirograph).

Video - Emma: A Victorian Romance, My Love Story!, Anthem of the Heart, Spy x Family, A Silent Voice, Garden of Words, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun, The Wind Rises, Your Name, Weathering With You, Clannad, Gourmet Girl Graffiti, Chobits, Porco Rosso, Wolf Children, Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, Penguin Highway, From Up on Poppy Hill, She The Ultimate Weapon, Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, K-on!, Royal Space Force Honneamise, Wotakoi, Summer Wars, Little Witch Academia
Audio - Jay Foreman - Spirograph
Completed September 2023

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
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FMV Videos

Trí Scéal

November 15, 2023 LantisEscudo

This is another video that I heard the song for many years ago and spent a long time looking for the right source to use.

Back in early 2007, I saw a video on Twitter of the pregame ceremonies at a New Zealand-Ireland rugby match from mid-2006, specifically highlighting the New Zealand haka. I didn't recognize the song used as Ireland's anthem, so I looked it up on Wikipedia afterwards, finding that it was an alternate anthem used by some of Ireland's national sports teams that represent the island as a whole, rather than just the Republic of Ireland. At the bottom of the page was a link to an uncredited MP3 that became the definitive version in my head, despite the huge number of covers, especially after Celtic Thunder covered it with slightly different lyrics. I wasn't able to find the artist of the version I wanted until 2022, which turned out to be one of the first recorded versions released, and included the Irish National Rugby Team as the background singers.

I didn't have a good idea for what source to use until Wolfwalkers came out and the trio of Cartoon Salon films started being referred to as the "Irish Folklore Trilogy." I'd only seen Secret of Kells at that point, but picked up the box set when it was released and watched the other two immediately. I found Song of the Sea the hardest to work with of the three, mostly because the setting was so far different from the other two, but I think they all worked well together in the end.

The title is simply "Three Stories" in Irish Gaelic.

Editing-wise, I was really working more by feel than going for anything with a distinct narrative structure. It works pretty well, and got nominated as a finalist in the Best Vibes category.

Video - Cartoon Saloon Irish Folklore Trilogy (The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, Wolfwalkers)
Audio - Andrew Strong - Ireland's Call
Completed September 2023

YouTube Link